Besides the obvious and prominent role of men at a blast furnace, women and children were also important in the workings. Perhaps surprisingly, without both women and girls in a supporting role the conditions would have drastically changed. They way the industry functioned might have even have been altered.

We’ll be having a series of posts on the subject of the roles women and children, particularly girl children, played in the iron industry, but this one underscores their role in the community that surrounded a blast furnace like Beckley.

Women

Women didn’t really do much except cook and maintain the households. While you may think that does not sound very important, it actually was. The men working at the furnace had to be incredibly strong. To stay strong, they had to eat a lot of protein and good food. The women spent most of their time cooking to meet those needs. We’ve seen estimates that a furnace worker, particularly one who worked in the casting shed, might burn an incredible 4000 calories per day, day after day, week after week, month after month. That’s a whole lot of food to prepare, and in an age when there were no supermarkets, everything had to be cooked from scratch — and that’s a whole lot of work; a full-time job, in fact.

Children (Girls)

The girls did mostly the same things as their mothers. A wife could not be expected to cook for more than one man (and her family) by herself. But that left plenty to do around the house. The girls were usually involved in other small tasks as well, although they usually helped their mothers with the cooking. With their mothers occupied with cooking, the girls generally also helped with laundry, cleaning, and maybe took on some cooking herself if her mother had too much to do. There was also a family garden to tend, and likely some livestock to take care of. Virtually all families had chickens, many had a hog or two, some had a milk cow. Each of these creatures took time to feed and care for — and usually this fell to the girl children according to their abilities. Of course there was school, too, although in many of the years that Beckley Furnace was active, an 8th grade education was considered more than enough, and, in an age before extracurriculars, girls had lots of time before and after school to do housework.

One unfortunate fact is that we have very little in the way of documents about the roles of females, and most of what we do know is second hand — someone, usually a man, mentioning what the women might have been doing. The rest? Well, we have had to examine the evidence and draw conclusions.

Also, it’s important to remember that while this may have been the life of females around a blast furnace, roles for women differed widely on the basis of their husband’s work. An ironmaster’s wife might have been expected to take an interest in the families of the furnace workers and offer hospitality when the big shots from Lime Rock visited. At a foundry, for example, there would likely be a whole middle class made up of molders and other skilled trades, and the roles of women there might have been different, too. And finally, there were the few women who were married to the executives and the owners — and their lives were still different, but no less demanding. Finally, this was an age when most middle class and all upper class families had household servants, most of them women, so their lives would have been different as well.

What could that possibly have to do with international trade and tariffs?

As it turns out, a fair amount!

You’ll recall that Beckley Furnace was owned for most of its useful life by the Barnum and Richardson Company. They used the output of Beckley largely to manufacture railroad car wheels at their Lime Rock foundries. Barnum and Richardson also effectively used a marketing technique called “product differentiation” to make its pig iron and its railroad car wheels different from the pig iron and railroad car wheels manufactured by others at that time.

“Salisbury iron” was advertised to be different from other iron — so much so that Barnum and Richardson named their iron mine in Michigan the “Salisbury Mine” even though it was mining an entirely different kind of iron ore for use in their Chicago wheel foundry just to permit them to attach a shred of honesty to their claim that all their car wheels were indeed made of “Salisbury ore”. (Since Beckley used almost entirely ore from the Ore Hill mine and another mine in the Township of Salisbury, calling it “Salisbury ore” was not a problem for the Beckley output — it was this other ore from Michigan that required a little bit of poetic license.

Back to the tariff:

Senator Barnum, a principal of Barnum and Richardson, was politically a Democrat, and in business terms a robber baron. He was disposed — both for his own economic interests and politically — to favor high tariffs on imports, especially imported pig iron and railroad car wheels, and for the most part high tariffs were in effect during this period.

Then along came a new Democratic presidential candidate, Grover Cleveland — and Senator Barnum, in his role has Chair of the National Democratic Committee, was expected to support the candidate’s policies, which happened to favor low tariffs. Senator Barnum, a good party man, swallowed his pride, subordinated his economic interests, sucked in, and supported the Democratic platform, upon which Grover Cleveland was elected President of the United States.

Where was the payoff for Senator Barnum?

Well, when Barnum died in 1889, during the four years that elapsed between the two terms that Cleveland served as President, Cleveland attended Barnum’s funeral at Trinity Church in Lime Rock. It was, presumably, a duty call — the press of the day reported that Mr. Cleveland left immediately following the services.

It would be an interesting exercise to track Beckley Furnace production against various tariff schemes in effect during the years it was functioning, and perhaps someone will eventually do that.

However, it is reasonably clear that export of Barnum and Richardson railroad car wheels, particularly to Latin America, continued strong through most of this period. It was said that as recently as 1975 Barnum and Richardson car wheels were still turning on railroads in Latin America — perhaps the last continent in which they were still in use.

The Barnum and Richardson Company has been mentioned many times on this website already, and for good reason: Barnum & Richardson owned Beckley Furnace for most of its useful life. There’s a lot more to be said about the Barnums and Richardsons, however, and particularly the Barnum family.

US Senator William H. Barnum was not only a principal of Barnum & Richardson, he was an entrepreneur in a golden age for entrepreneurs — so much was it a golden age for entrepreneurs that it is known today as the Gilded Age, and the entrepreneurs were known as robber barons.

Here’s a historic document. It’s from the papers of the Henrico Coal Company (in Richmond, Virginia) showing both Senator Barnum and his son, William Milo Barnum, a New York City attorney, as officers of that company.

The source of this document is a microfilm of a portion of the papers of William M. Barnum in the Library of the University of Washington — located in the Library of Virginia, in Richmond, VA. Interestingly, another company’s records also appear on that microfilm, the minutes book of the Kanawha Improvement Company (1887-1890), which was actually a railroad company in West Virginia.

We’ll be documenting more of these outside connections in future posts.

People ask about the rusted machine…

It’s big. It’s heavy. It’s rusty. And, unless you know that it’s a turbine, you might not recognize that it’s fundamentally the same technology as the gray machine displayed in the turbine house.

Both are turbines. And both operated at Beckley Furnace at more or less the same times.

While the turbine in the turbine shed powered the blowing tubs — the air compressors that provided the blast for Beckley Furnace — this turbine had a more mundane function: it powered a sawmill.

Fair question: why might there be a sawmill at a blast furnace site? After all, sawing wood and making pig iron would seem to be pretty much unrelated functions, right?

Here are some of the possible answers, and more than one could be correct:

There was a sawmill here because there was an opportunity to use water power twice — first, to power the blast for the blast furnace, and then, before returning it to the Blackberry River, to run this turbine to power a sawmill.

Wood needed to be sawed (or sawn, as they might have said a hundred years ago), and this was as good a place to do it as any. There was water power, there was a place to put the sawmill (between the blowing tubs and the stove that heated the blast), there were people around who knew about turbines. Wood was needed to build things — sheds, other structures — in the East Canaan works of Barnum and Richardson, or in greater East Canaan.

Wood played an important but often overlooked role in the iron industry. Different kinds of wood were used for very specific purposes. For example, in close-up photos of the main turbine, you’ll see a ring of wood near the bottom end. This was a special wood, lignum vitae, imported from Africa,that was very strong and did not deteriorate in water. This ring of wood — and what you see in the turbine today is over 100 years old, most of that time spend immersed in mud — served as the main bearing for the generator. Another example would be the wood patterns used to create the molds in which railroad car wheels were cast at the Barnum Richardson Company works in Lime Rock. This was another highly specialized wood. We think it’s possible that this sawmill did very specialized sawing of unusual woods needed at various parts of Barnum and Richardson’s iron making and fabrication process.

Why do YOU think there was a sawmill at Beckley Furnace?

What plans to you have for this turbine?

After all, it’s a shame to see it rust away!

Currently under discussion are ways to conserve the Loeffel turbine, as well as ways to display it. Some of the ideas currently under consideration include building a second turbine shed (like the one upstream) but more or less where this turbine is located. Also we’re considering the possibility of displaying it recessed in the ground, so that people can see how it might have been positioned to operate.

Visit the site and let us have your ideas — or send in your ideas on the form below!

It’s not there any more…

In fact, the water wheel was replaced with the turbine sometime around 1875, give or take 20 years — we lack records for the period — and the turbine was replaced by a steam engine around 1910.

But, people ask, where was the water wheel when it was running?

Here’s the easy way to tell.

Go to the turbine house. Look for the yellow safety tape (soon to be replaced with safety fencing).

The water wheel was very close to the present turbine house — just beyond the yellow safety tape, in fact!

The pit on the other side of the safety tape was the wheel pit in which the wheel turned.

If you’d like more information about what kind of water wheel was used, understand first that there were three basic types of water wheels:

The overshot wheel, when the water was run into the wheel at the top. Generally these were the most powerful wheels, but you needed quite a drop in the water level to power one that was of the size of the wheel at Beckley.

The undershot wheel, when only the bottom of the wheel was in the wheel race (where the water ran) (this was the least powerful type of water wheel).

The breast wheel, where the water was directed at the wheel right about the middle of it. A hybrid of the undershot and overshot wheels, it was quite effective, but did not require the “head” that the overshot wheel needed.

At Beckley, as far as we have been able to determine from the records, a breast wheel was always used.

Like this:

Water needs to reach the turbine…

in order for it to operate. In modern hydroelectric facilities today, one sees penstocks — huge iron or steel tubes that carry the water from the dam to the turbine. There is still a penstock at Beckley Furnace, although it’s no longer operating:

The penstock takes water from the dam to the turbine

In the photo, you can see holes in the dam where this penstock connected — or did it? Research — and old photographs — reveal that the penstock did NOT connect directly to the dam!

Instead, it connected to a wooden water chest that was mounted on the face of the dam. (the water chest is long gone, and was long gone before the dam was reconstructed a few years ago). While we don’t know exactly why the water chest was used, we suspect that it had to do with further controlling the flow of the water. While there was a valve on the dam to control the flow through the pipe that ultimately fed the penstock, we think that possibly both holes in the dam could have fed the water chest, thus providing the ability to fill it more rapidly.

Like this:

I thought this was a blast furnace, not a zoo!

Different kinds of problems at a blast furnace leave different kinds of evidence. Two of them — related, but not the same thing by far — are called by the imaginative names of furnace bear and salamander.

What was a furnace bear?

In the smelting process, occasionally a glob of molten iron would adhere to the inside of the stack. There were ways to deal with the problem when one was detected (they involved men at the top, trying to pry the glob loose from the inside of the stack using 40 foot long iron poles — hazardous and difficult work). However, they didn’t always work, and sometimes the glob hardened and was removed when the furnace was next shut down.

A furnace bear at Beckley Furnace

Here’s a furnace bear that was at some time removed from the stack at Beckley. Does this look like a bear climbing a tree to you? It did to the people who worked at the furnace over a century ago!

And how’s that different from a salamander?

Well, if you think of a salamander as the whole hearth of the furnace turning into a congealed disk of iron, unmelted ingredients, and a few bricks from the hearth itself, you would be pretty much correct.

They tended to happen on two different kinds of situations. First, when a furnace was shut down for major maintenance. There was always likely to be some molten iron left in the bottom of the furnace that solidified and created a salamander. The second case was more serious. It occurred when there was a failure somewhere in the smelting process and a whole mass of iron, unmelted/unburned ingredients, and pieces of the furnace floor and wall, congealed into a solid mass.

A salamander at Beckley Furnace

Here’s a particularly ugly one. We’re told that the furnace had to be partially disassembled to remove a salamander, and that it would take several teams of oxen to pull it out.

No, it doesn’t look like any salamander we’ve ever seen, but evidently it did to the furnace workers of a century and more ago!

How the did the iron ore get into the furnace?

The simple answer is that iron ore, charcoal, and limestone were dumped into the top of the furnace, but there’s more to it than that.

The way it got to the top of the furnace was via a bridge that ran from the top of the furnace across Lower Road to the top of the “charging wall”

The charging wall the high stone wall you see on the north side of the road, across from the furnace. Workers pushed wheelbarrows of iron ore, of charcoal, and of limestone across that bridge to the furnace.

Charcoal cart, used to dump charcoal into the top of the furnace

(Here’s a photo of a charcoal cart — it could hold a lot of charcoal. The carts for limestone and iron ore were smaller because limestone and iron ore are heavier.)

Photo of the bridge between the charging wall and the top of the furnace

You can see the bridge in this photo — it’s one of the missing links in the reconstructed furnace. It was enclosed (to keep the charcoal, iron ore, and limestone dry, not to mention the walkway where the men wheeled the wheelbarrows) and you can see it running from the charcoal sheds in the upper left to the top of the furnace on the right.

Before they could dump it in, the blast had to be stopped briefly — and when that was done, the workers had to hustle to get the wheelbarrows dumped before the blast restarted. If the blast was stopped for too long, the liquid iron and slag already in the furnace would solidify. If the blast wasn’t stopped long enough, the workers with the wheelbarrows could have been asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide from the furnace forced into the room where they were dumping their wheelbarrows.

Something to think about: Today we have machines that handle feeding blast furnaces, usually operating under computer control. Yet at Beckley Furnace people did that job using wheelbarrows. What might have caused the change in methods over the years? What have been some of the effects of this kind of change?

Like this:

Where (and what) was the casting shed?

(this post came from the old website, with a few modifications) A question we’re frequently asked (not as frequently as we’re asked “What was this place, anyway?” but still pretty frequently) concerns the place of the blast furnace in the overall scheme of things at Beckley. After all, there’s this magnificent stone column standing there, and somehow it looks more like a work of Neolithic sculpture than an industrial artifact. So, we don’t blame people for being a little disoriented and confused! One of our most important tasks as Friends of Beckley Furnace is to “interpret” what you see there — to make it comprehensible. Toward that end, since the stone column at Beckley Furnace was the furnace itself, and the furnace was only a part of a much larger industrial facility, we’ve started making it easier to understand that the furnace was actually located in a long-vanished building called the casting shed. As well as containing the furnace itself, the casting shed also was the place where the molten iron was drawn from the furnace into impressions in a bed of casting sand, making the familiar sow-and-piglet pattern, which gave rise to the term “pig iron”. To start with, here’s a photograph of Beckley Furnace in operation around 1896 (before the fire of 1896): (the source of the image is “Scrap Book of North Canaan”)

In the lower right corner of the picture, you will see the casting shed, the building with the curved roof. Running horizontally across the middle of the picture is the passageway used to transport the charcoal, iron ore, and limestone from the top of the charging wall (at extreme left, to the left of Lower Road) to the top of the furnace.

Now, how to relate that to what you see at Beckley Furnace today: You’ll see that we have outlined the foundation of the casting shed you see in the picture above with limestone.

The gap in the outline is where the casting shed door you see in the picture above was located. (This photo is looking down on the casting shed’s western wall. The furnace is off screen to your left. The white limestone shows where the walls of the casting shed once stood.)

In this photo, we’ve backed up a bit from the one above. (Note that the chain link fence that protected the furnace stack during restoration is no longer present today).

This photo is looking westward, from the ruins of the boiler house. The furnace appears on your right in the photo, and Blackberry River is off screen to your left (once again, that chain link fence isn’t there anymore).

Looking northward, toward the remains of the north wall of the casting house (and where we took the first photo in this set)

So, that outlines where the casting shed was!!

Why do you suppose they put the furnace in a building to begin with? Well, one important reason was to protect the molten iron from rain or snow. Have you ever seen what happens when a few drops of water land in a very hot frying pan? Now, remember that the molten iron was far hotter than the hottest frying pan….what might have happened?

Like this:

The Fire of 1896

The fire of 1896 put Beckley Furnace out of commission for three full years. Interestingly, this may also have been when the decision was made to raise the height of the furnace to 40 feet. We do know that Barnum and Richardson encountered many difficulties in getting the furnace back in commission.

Friend of Beckley Furnace Richard Paddock has studied the Fire of 1896 in considerable depth. In addition to more readily available sources, he searched the local newspapers of the time for events occurring during the period the furnace was out of commission. You can read his complete report by clicking on The Fire of 1896

Thanks to Dick for this study! We will be following it with additional studies that are intended for those who are interested in Beckley Furnace, the Barnum and Richardson Company, and the iron industry in the Upper Housatonic Valley at a level that goes beyond the casual.